Hanging on ere winter comes. (photo by L) |
D recounted how he had first met M at the U3A and been drawn to him, and eventually learned of the Gurdjieff Meetings. D had also been doing meditations with the Insight Timer app. He had been using the mantra om mani padme hum, and had found music for it online which was absolutely beautiful, but since then his app had crashed and he had been unable to use it. He did not know whether that was a synchronicity. There was so much going on, he had so much to say, but he felt he couldn't say anything. He was confused. His relationship had not worked out, and now M had passed away.
For T it was two months since her last Meeting. She had had an extraordinary experience of very sudden ill health. She had been reviewing her records from the peak flow chart, which comprised a page for each month. Her period of critical illness, which had prevented her from attending the previous Meeting, had been exactly a month before M's severe stroke and death, each occurring over five days. She wondered if there was some link with what had happened to her exactly a month before, a kind of reverse causality. It felt so connected. "R" said that when you are working on yourself you are more sensitive, it is not necessarily explainable. T spoke about how years before, she had met M when L introduced him to her. M came to live in London from Harare, and the conversation always turned to speaking passionately and consistently about the ideas of Gurdjieff. Setting up the North London Gurdjieff Meetings came about to enable a focus and outlet for M's intense interest in the philosophical works of Gurdjieff, Nicoll and Ouspensky.
L said that on the day of M's death, while at the hospital, L had been looking at Meetings with Remarkable Men, following up a reference suggested by "R". He had come across the paragraph describing the Yezidi boy trapped in a chalk circle drawn on the ground, and curious about this phenomenon, searched Google on Yezidi and circle. The first word in the first article which came up started with the word "synchronicity", which seemed connected with the exercise for the month, to keep a record of synchronicities - it was in fact a meta-synchroniticity - a synchronicity about synchronicity. He mentioned Paulo Coelho's view that they are, in the form of omens, the common language of the world, which is a theme in his novel, The Alchemist.
The Terreskane Hotel |
Poem by M |
"R" read out some quotations. From the beginning of Beelzebub's Tales:
Any prayer may be heard by the Higher Powers and a corresponding answer obtained only if it is uttered thrice:
Firstly—for the welfare or the peace of the souls of one’s parents.
Secondly—for the welfare of one’s neighbor.
And only thirdly—for oneself personally.
From the last part of The Third Series:
What they call the "soul" does really exist, but not everybody necessarily has one.
A soul is not born with man and can neither unfold nor take form in him so long as his body is not fully developed.
It is a luxury that can only appear and attain completion in the period of "responsible age," that is to say, in a man's maturity.
The soul, like the physical body, is also matter—only, it consists of "finer" matter.
The matter from which the soul is formed and from which it later nourishes and perfects itself is, in general, elaborated during the processes that take place between the two essential forces upon which the entire Universe is founded.
The matter in which the soul is coated can be produced exclusively by the action of these two forces, which are called "good" and "evil" by ancient science, or "affirmation" and "negation," while contemporary science calls them "attraction" and "repulsion."
In the common presence of a man, these two forces have their source in two of the totalities of general psychic functioning, which have already been mentioned.
One of them coincides with that function whose factors proceed from
the results of impressions received from outside, and the other appears as a function whose factors issue chiefly from the results of the specific functioning of the organs, as determined by heredity.
and in Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff's father tells him:
In that soul which a man supposedly has, as people believe, and of which they say that it exists independently after death and transmigrates, I do not believe; and yet, in the course of a man’s life “something” does form itself in him: this is for me beyond all doubt.
‘As I explain it to myself, a man is born with a certain property and, thanks to this property, in the course of his life certain of his experiencing elaborate in him a certain substance, and from this substance there is gradually formed in him “something or other” which can acquire a life almost independent of the physical body.
‘When a man dies, this “something” does not disintegrate at the same time as the physical body, but only much later, after its separation from the physical body.
T said that when M was unconscious, before he died, his forehead was completely, utterly, smooth.
The Meeting finished early and all present went to the nearby cemetery to attend the funeral.
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